Amazon is the runaway leader in eCommerce. Most people discover the products they're looking for quickly because the product pages on Amazon are full of great information, and Amazon guides visitors toward a buying decision. This is a teaching moment for SMB retailers, brands, wholesalers, and distributors who want to mimic the content success strategies of large retailers.
Fortunately, there is an abundance of affordable tools to help. But it's not just about tools; it's the commitment of the owner to give these tools the focus they deserve. For most companies, an affordable turnkey cloud solution or easy-to-use SaaS platform that takes a few days to implement removes the barrier to getting started.
While there are many reasons people buy on Amazon, the top ones are discoverability, user experience, and trust. To compete in your category, you must start somewhere and establish your unique value proposition for your web store. This article is about both content and analytics as they relate to a visitor adding your product to the cart. You want that sale.
Best-in-class tools reign supreme
Larger companies have best-in-class tools for continuous content diagnostics: a highly regimented onboarding process, QA, and huge budgets to improve each of millions of product pages. Amazon may well be on its way to being the largest product database as well as the gold standard. Ask yourself: if you had a UPC or SKU, where would you look up the product specs? Most buyers these days skip Google and go directly to Amazon, even if they're only researching.
Companies like Amazon, Google, Walmart, and Home Depot understand that content is king and good content is good for commerce. Conversely, bad content is bad for commerce across all channels. These companies continuously tighten their onboarding requirements based on the data feeds they receive. They've scientifically recognized the key factors in product pages that cause cart abandonment. Every visitor is not a buyer, but the visitor who is a buyer decides based on detailed descriptions, great imagery, reasonable pricing, reviews, data quality, stock and shipment, and, most importantly, the specific attributes they're looking for.
Differentiate with content that speaks to your value
There are commodity items where price decides everything, but that's not the case for branded items and unique categories. Would you buy the cheapest tablet? The higher the price of the item, the more information buyers require. When buying a camera, if the zoom factor is missing or takes too long to find, a buyer may not purchase. If a food item doesn't say gluten free, and that's the key decision factor, the sale is lost. The more attributes, the better.
Options for the SME to compete
So what does the aspiring SME store owner do to compete with the 800-pound gorillas? Simple answer: first, complete product pages based on industry standards as well as your own, then compete for traffic and SEO ranking on key product pages.
For SMEs, investing in product page diagnostics and optimization is the best strategy and ensures a much higher conversion rate. Think of it like this: you drive 20 people to your product page and 2 buy, versus driving 10 and 2 buy. The first is 10% conversion, the second is 20% with a much smaller traffic budget. Anyone can figure out that ROI quickly. There are over a million stores selling great products who are told to generate traffic through SEO packages that go over budget with disappointing results. Fix the page first.
Get discovered first, then compete
Discoverability and findability are key to holding a visitor's interest. With the right keyword someone could discover your company, but if your products are classified incorrectly, the actual SKU page may never be found. Content analytics improves discoverability both internally on your site and externally on Google and other search engines. Make it easy for the visitor with faceted attribute search and easy navigation.
Measure and monitor in real time, 24/7
Content gaps cause sales to evaporate. Since most companies don't measure and monitor content gaps in their catalogs, there's no way to know which gaps are critically hurting their business. Often, keywords with poor traffic volume are used, so products rank low on Google and Amazon. Data errors or wrong classifications can prevent a product from being found on your own site: a ring classified as a bracelet might not show at all. Promoting out-of-stock items is a huge money drain. In short, SMEs lack the tools to manage product information like the big players, and don't have time to QA or run real-time diagnostics against rules that work for their industry.
Time for a check-up
You don't want to wait until a product isn't selling to find and fix what's broken. A problem fixed at the finish line costs ten times what it would at the starting gate. If you're not sure your eCommerce data is at peak performance, it's time for a health analysis of your site. It can instantly alert you to what's working on your web store and what's driving customers straight into the arms of Amazon.
Anand Ayyar